Older People Need Less Sleep, Right?

The ideal sleep duration seems to still be a mystery to everyone. Many previous studies reveal that in this modern era more and more people lack of sleep. But a new study in the UK revealed that the sleep time can be different for each age range.

The study also found that people who are elderly may require fewer hours of sleep. In addition, this study also explains that each person can have a varied amount of time sleeping in the category for fair and not excessive.

“The apparently healthy elderly characterized by reduced sleep time and increased time off during the day,” said the researcher, as reported by Live Science.

These results were found after the research of 110 healthy adults. They have no trouble in sleeping, and have no complaints in terms of sleep. The adults had an age range of 20 years to 83 years. Researchers then looked at the average sleep time, within eight hours a night.

Researchers found that participants aged 20-30 years averaged over 7.23 hours. While participants aged 40-55 years average = average sleep for 6.83 hours. On the other hand, elderly participants had an average sleep time of 6.51 hours.

From these data the researchers found that the older person require the shorter sleep time. In addition to sleep time, number of hours spent in the elderly participants stages of deep sleep also less compared to younger participants. Meanwhile, elderly participants actually takes longer, ie 14.2 minutes to fall asleep immediately compared to participants aged 40-55 years because they take only 11.7 minutes and the young participants only 8.7 minutes.

Even so researchers acknowledge that the role of sleep is still not clearly understood. They are also not sure about how much the amount of sleep needed by each person, because it can be so different and very varied. Some people even have different genes that make them need a little more time to sleep.